92 TILLERING IN INDIAN SUGARCANES 



discover any indication that the true character of the branches has been deter- 

 mined in Java. After a good many dissections, we conclude that it would 

 be a very difficult thing, without experience thus gained, to detect which are 

 the mother canes of the crop. There seems, in general, to be a tendency to 

 assume that these are thicker than the rest, but our results are exactly the 

 opposite, as will be seen in the sequel (Part III, section 6). We cannot there- 

 fore think that the opinions on this point either in Louisiana or in Java are 

 altogether trustworthy. 



A certain amount of work has been done at various times in the Laboratory 

 of the Cane-breeding Station, on the richness of the juice in the different 

 canes in the clump during growth and at crop time. In our study of early 

 and late canes, we made use of the members of the Pansahi group, because, 

 before we had made our dissections, it was easy to distinguish between the 

 early and late canes. Some of the results of this study have been given in 

 Memoir II (p. 159), where it is shown that, in several varieties {Maneria, Kahu, 

 Yuba and Pansahi), it was easy to separate the different classes of branches 

 at crop time, and that, in their analysis, the earlier formed canes were invari- 

 ably richer in their juice than the later. At the close of the 1917-18 crop, an 

 attempt was made to divide the cut canes into classes, by observing the charac- 

 ters by which the branches of different orders could be separated, starting with 

 thickness of cane and, where necessary, introducing length of basal part, 

 average length of lower joints, curvature, etc. This separation was, as usual, 

 found to be specially easy in the members of the Pansahi group. One hundred 

 canes were thus dealt wdth in each of the varieties dissected and these were 

 divided into their appropriate classes and separately analysed. The results 

 obtained in the members of the Pansahi group are given in the table, and we 

 see that they agree quite well with those given in the previous Memoir. In 

 Maneria, the percentage of sucrose in the different classes from earliest to 

 latest was 14-25, 13-74, 13-63, 13-57, 9-80, and in Yuha 15*17, 14-86, 13-14, 

 12-53 and 1240. 



